


Untitled Roadtrip AU

by leksaf



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:34:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23506936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leksaf/pseuds/leksaf
Summary: Luisa was broken and broken-hearted, on a mission to head east without any real way of getting there. The fact that Rose had just hit her with her car and was headed in the same direction? Well...that had to be fate, right?
Relationships: Luisa Alver/Rose Solano
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Untitled Roadtrip AU

It was an unseasonably cold and rainy night in June.

Luisa wondered how she got there, standing on the side of the highway with her thumb held high in the air. She turned her head after every car that passed her by, silently cursing them and grinding her teeth together. The rain had long since soaked through her clothes and she could feel the cold seeping into her bones.

Her umbrella had broken an hour ago at a gas station when the wind tore it apart. The pimple-faced teenager at the counter had told her she was in Apple Valley, only about an hour and a half away from where she had started. And it had taken her three hours just for the first person to take pity on her and pull over.

She had been a middle-aged woman with two young kids in the backseat who barely paid attention as Luisa slid into the passenger seat with her arms wrapped around herself in search of warmth. The woman—Carla, she soon introduced herself as—had thin blonde hair with split-ends and dark circles under her soft, brown eyes. She turned the heat up when she saw Luisa shivering.

“Where are you headed?” Carla asked. Luisa remained silent for a while, and she was grateful when Carla did not press the question further. “Well, I’m headed towards a hotel a couple of hours from where we are right now. Is that all right?”

“Is it east?” she asked. Carla nodded. “Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome,” Carla replied happily. 

Luisa wondered if the kids arguing between themselves in the backseat were a cover, if Carla was actually a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers and murdered them like in the movie she watched a few weeks ago. After she convinced herself that was not the case, she wondered why the hell a single mother with two young children would allow a stranger in her car for any period of time.

“Give me my giraffe!” one of the kids—the girl, with thick hair the same color as Carla’s—shouted. The brown-haired boy in the other car-seat let out a high-pitched shriek that made Luisa cringe.

“Kids!” Carla snapped, her voice sharp and authoritative. “We have a guest. Behave, or I’m taking every single toy that is back there.”

The boy, James, pursed his lips but ceased his shrieking, and the girl, Isabella, looked away from her brother guiltily. “Sorry mama,” Isabella said quietly.

“Sorry,” James repeated begrudgingly. He then perked up as he turned his attention to Luisa, who was staring out the window. “Who are you?” he asked loudly.

“James, use your manners.” Carla sounded tired and she did not take her eyes off the road as she spoke.

“Sorry. Excuse me, ma’am, who are you?” James asked as politely as he could manage. 

Luisa stifled a laugh at his boldness. His sister, on the other hand, was shyly sneaking glances at Luisa and trying to pretend that her curiosity did not exist. “My name is Luisa,” she told him. 

“How come I don’t know you?” James was staring at her intensely with wide, brown eyes, and for a moment she envied the innocence that she found in them when she turned to face him.

“What do you mean?” 

“Me and Isabella know all of mama’s friends, but she never told us about you,” he explained. Luisa and Carla glanced quickly at each other. How do you explain to your kids that you basically damned their safety and picked up a stranger off the side of a highway? 

Carla cleared her throat, but it was Isabella who spoke up first. “Who’s Chloe?” she asked as she looked at James. The young boy’s face immediately turned bright red as he stuttered out something unintelligible. “Tommy said she’s your girlfriend.” He slammed his back into his seat angrily, betrayed by his sister, and crossed his arms over his chest with a huff. It was clear that he was no longer interested in how Luisa knew his mother.

A triumphant smile spread across Isabella’s face and she looked between Luisa and Carla knowingly. Carla leaned over towards Luisa and whispered, “She terrifies me sometimes. Six years old and she just somehow immediately knows everything about a situation.” Luisa chuckled.

The rest of the car ride was mostly quiet, with Isabella and James chattering indistinctly in the backseat. James had left Luisa alone for the most part, consulting her only when he needed another opinion during a debate with Isabella. The three-way conversation between Luisa and the kids on the topic of peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and fluff became increasingly heated until Carla eventually had to put a stop to it.

They left the debate open-ended with Isabella on the side of peanut butter and fluff, James preferring peanut butter and jelly, and Luisa adamantly advocating for both. Carla refused to offer her opinion on the matter, convinced that if she had chosen a side the entire car would have broken into complete chaos. She was probably right, but James and Isabella had continued to complain about their mother’s lack of participation for a good ten minutes before they finally lost interest. 

Thirty minutes later, Carla pulled into the parking lot of a hotel. She looked over at Luisa with something in her eyes that resembled pity. An uncomfortable silence fell over them and Luisa stomach felt suddenly uncomfortable. The kids had fallen asleep a few minutes prior and were completely unaware of their mother’s growing concern.

Before Carla had a chance to say anything, Luisa opened her door and offered a soft smile. “Thanks for the ride,” she said. She turned to step out of the car, but Carla caught her wrist gently.

“I—the room I paid for has two beds. The kids can sleep with me if you need a place to stay.” 

The offer hung heavy in the air. The sun had set a while ago, and the crescent moon hung high in the sky somewhere, obscured by the clouds. The heavy droplets of rain that had fallen over them in the beginning of their trip had long since turned into a soft drizzle. Luisa was surprised that the rain had continued outside of Los Angeles, as if the heavens had been mourning just as darkly as she had that day.

“I appreciate the ride, Carla, I really do. But I’m okay from here,” Luisa said. She regretted it as soon as she said it; what better option did she have than sleeping on a comfortable hotel bed and continuing her hitchhiking adventure when the sun was out again? Still, she was never one to accept help when it came from a place that felt like pity or obligation—it was something that her father had ingrained into her mind since she was even younger than Isabella. 

Carla’s grip on her wrist remained as she reached into the center console and pulled out a pen and mini-notepad. She scribbled something on a piece of paper, ripped it from the pad, and pressed it into Luisa’s palm. “I don’t know where you’re headed, but my family is pretty spread out across the country. Just…call me if you need something, okay? A place to stay, a ride—it would be a short ride, probably, most of my family members are assholes, but almost all of them owe me—just anything, okay?”

“Why?” Luisa asked.

“Well, I’m the only lawyer in my family, and most of my relatives are idiots, so I’ve had to come to the rescue of most of them,” Carla said, explaining the complete wrong thing.

Luisa let out a sigh of a laugh. “No, I mean…why would you help me?”

Carla slowly released her grip on Luisa’s wrist and stared at her almost sadly. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but when I was…a lot younger, I went through some stuff that left me having to trust people I didn’t know. Some of them didn’t turn out to be trustworthy and I just—well, I wish there had been someone who at least tried to keep me safe, but there wasn’t. I don’t want it to be the same for you.”

The sudden wetness in Carla’s eyes led Luisa to nod appreciatively and carefully fold the paper before placing it into the pocket of her jeans. “I really appreciate this, Carla,” she told the other woman. She smiled graciously one last time before finally leaving the car.

She started down the sidewalk towards a distant gas station sign. 

An hour and a half later was where she found herself, on the side of the highway. Most of the streetlamps were broken or flickering, and she found herself relying mostly on the crescent-moon that shone down on her between passing rainclouds. The drizzle had begun to fall harder once again, leaving her in her current situation.

Her arms ached from being held up, even with the breaks she took every so often to seek temporary shelter under the thick foliage of a nearby tree. The headlights of a car in the distant caught her eye, and she pushed off the tree-trunk to walk back to the edge of the break-down lane.

She raised her arm once again, and her muscles trembled from exhaustion and the cold that had settled heavy within her. The car passed by her same as the rest, but not before the tires rushed through a deep pothole and splashed near-freezing water all over her. “Shit!” she screamed as she stomped against the pavement.

The gas station sign still glowed brightly on the other side of the highway. Rolling her eyes, she began to walk back across the highway.

***

“Can I have the bathroom key?” 

It was the same pimple-faced teenager as earlier, though she doubted that he remembered her, and his expression did not betray that doubt. He sighed before looking at her and said unemotionally, “Bathroom is only for paying customers.”

“If someone’s going to pay to pee then the bathroom should at least be inside,” she muttered as she grabbed a pack of gum and slapped it down onto the counter. The boy rang it up and passed her the key when she slid two dollars to him. She took the bathroom key with a roll of her eyes and left without the change or the gum. 

The bathroom was small and she was instantly suffocated by the overwhelming stench of piss. Her shoes stuck lightly to the floor with each step towards the sink and she had to let the faucet run for a minute before the water finally turned from rusty brown to mostly-clear. She scooped up a handful and splashed it onto to her face.

She looked into the heavily stained mirror and sighed. There had been a perfectly warm, safe, clean bathroom up in the hotel, with a kind woman who seemed to have no malicious intent and two kids that had quite taken to her during their debates. How could she have passed up that offer?

_“Don’t let anyone pity you. It will make you weak.”_

Her jaw clenched as her father’s words rang through her head. It was only after he had lost his business, when she was two years old, that he began drilling that into mind. He was a proud man, and he refused to let the rest of his family—most of whom had doubted he would ever be successful to begin with—help him get back on his feet financially. It eventually ruined their family, though she supposed that their family was probably broken from the start.

She sucked in a deep breath before pushing out of the bathroom. Gentler than she had been before, she placed the key back onto the counter and shoved the pack of gum that was still there into her back pocket. “Thanks,” she mumbled before leaving the store.

The last working streetlamp bulb had burned out three days prior and left the neon sign as the only source of light. Luisa kicked a rock out of her way as she made her way down the sidewalk, heading back towards the short field of trees that led to the highway.

A sharp car horn was the last thing she heard—after that, everything was black.


End file.
